Saturday, March 21, 2009

I know people have done in depth reviews etc..., but here is a quick a low down of what you need to do as a web developer to support IE8.

I am going to assume that you have been a standards based web developer for the last couple of years and that you have not been doing too many hacks to support IE7.

1) Add the new metatag in the top of the to force IE8 to render in standards mode.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4" />

Without this tag a little button appears next to the location bar which allows the user to view the site in IE7 compatibility mode. You probably don't want to do this because you want people to view your nice standards compliant website and also the render mode is slightly different from real IE7 in any case.

2) If you were using conditional comments to catch IE and add some extra CSS, you will probably need to update the condition from